


one thought too many

by pigeonsatdawn



Series: lonely hearts [2]
Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, i force them to have a heart to heart that's it, we haven't seen the cave in a while have we
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:55:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29942049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonsatdawn/pseuds/pigeonsatdawn
Summary: They spend their nights thinking about each other, more than they’d like to admit, and there’s only so much thought one can keep to themselves.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Series: lonely hearts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2197239
Comments: 21
Kudos: 58





	one thought too many

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rabbit_hearted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/gifts).



> I’m not exactly sure what possessed me to dedicate a fic to you, Rabbit, but when I write anything Kieran, somehow you’re the first person I think of. It's not the best, so don’t expect too much, but I hope you enjoy it anyway ❤️

**“KIERAN, PLEASE TELL ME YOU’RE THERE,”** her voice calls, and in the cave it resonates around neverending, echo overlapping over echo until it diminishes into a whisper, and it’s easy to assume that the voice is a figment of the imagination. Real voices don’t last that long—nothing real lasts longer than the moment it lives in, and around Kieran White, everything wilts a little too quickly for his liking, spare the demons that haunt his every breath. 

The voice may be phantom, but the feeling is as real, as stinging as the cold that perpetually envelopes him. Before he realizes it, a scream of anguish escapes his parted lips cracked from the frigid temperature, his voice equally as harsh. 

Outside, it makes Lauren Sinclair jump, not expecting such a voice to have been elicited from within the cave. It doesn’t help the panic that has been building up in her the past few days due to his absence—he did inform her that he won’t be around for a couple of days, but it’s been longer than the amount of days he’s requested for official work leave, and not a single sign of him since then. She went to wherever she thought he might be: his apartment, streets of Greychapel, the docks, and everywhere else—and then back to his apartment, where she considered breaking in, just to see whether he’s still in the country at all. He might’ve upped and left—but he might’ve been dead, for all she knows. 

She needs to know for sure.

“Kieran?” she calls out, her voice a bit weaker than before. “Is that… you?”

Lauren Sinclair is often doubtful, though rarely in the face of men. The voice is foreign to Kieran White, whom she often has to maintain an unfaltering facade in front of. So soft, so unreal, that it slides by the walls of the cave, flowing in little streams into his consciousness. And _oh_ , does it feel like a dream too ethereal to dwell in his dreadful mind. 

Oh, the irony of the sharpness of cotton clouds, how the air of the mountains pierces the lungs like thorns. 

In his misery, he wails weakly. “Please,” a whimper so woeful.

The walls of the cave amplify it anyway, and Lauren hears it, too. 

Her heart picks up its speed, anxiety draining the blood away from her face. “Kieran, are you okay?” she yells louder this time. “Hey, Kieran, if you hear me, let me in. Are you injured? God, are you—”

“Lauren?”

The voice is as tender as his plea, less desperate, more unbelieving. Like waking up to see only white.

“Are you… really here?”

It becomes increasingly clear to her that Kieran is not okay, and she raises her voice even more, if that would keep him awake. “I’m really here, Kieran, and it’s freaking _freezing_ out here. Have you been asleep in there? Through this weather?” 

Now that, _that_ sounds like Lauren. 

Kieran jumps out of the bed, and though his hands are clammy, he walks toward the gate that keeps him locked in the cave. 

“I’m barely conscious, but not as peaceful as a slumber would be.”

He sees her through the bars, all drenched from molten snow, worry creasing her face, and he wonders. Wonders if she’s okay, wonders if he has the luxury to even wonder about her wellbeing.

Lauren looks at him through the bars. He looks like years have gone through him instead of days, with the weariness written across his body, in the edge of every angle and the vertex of every curve. A vacuum of life, save his eyes—his eyes, they’re vividly bloodshot. Terribly, painfully crimson. 

Kieran moves to unlock the gate, and Lauren’s gaze trails down to his body. Little escapes her notice, and it’s glaringly obvious that his limbs have been impaired, because he moves with the gracefulness of a jammed drawer, all too disconnected. He lets out a soft grunt; this, too, she notices.

The gate opens, and immediately she rushes over to him. “Shit, Kieran, are you alright? Let me—”

“I’ve dealt with my injuries, don’t worry,” he reassures her. Not that it’s very much effective, even if she processes it as truth—her frown only deepens as she looks up to him. Kieran tries for a smile, but his muscles waver, and he lets out a resigned sigh. “Why exactly are you here, Lauren? You’re not supposed to be here.”

“That’s precisely why I’m here, Kieran.”

Kieran doesn’t raise an eyebrow, even though he intends to. His face can barely comply. 

Lauren sees his gaze, anyway. She can’t quite pry her eyes away—even if his normally electric cerulean orbs are flooded with so much red, and it flushes her guts with harrowing pain. “I haven’t seen you in days; you’re nowhere to be found, and I wondered if you’re dead—or, worse, ignoring me for some reason you shouldn’t be.”

“You really need to set your priorities straight,” he comments with little mirth in his voice, turning around and breaking eye contact, dragging his feet. “Did you miss me that much—”

“I’m worried that someone got to kill you before I do, is why,” Lauren deadpans, following him inside. Her breath hitches slightly when she remembers what happened the last time she was in there, and she brings up a hand to clutch the collar of her shirt, pressing against the bones of her fingers.

“Don’t worry, that privilege is reserved for you and only you, _mon amour_. Now you can rest assured that I’m safe and healthy, and you can go back into the lovely chambers of your castle, and get a good night’s rest.”

“No.”

The voice is hers, firm, and it hits against the stone walls with the force of a gong, ringing in Kieran’s head.

“You should explain where you’ve been,” Lauren argues. “That’s the least you owe me, after all the worry you’ve put me through.”

The sigh he elicits surrounds the air ambiently. “I… did tell you I’d be away for a PS order. I doubt you want to hear much about that,” he says somberly. “I’m a little too drained to talk anyway. I feel like passing out any minute now, so if you could kindly just lock up the cage before you leave and throw the key as far inside as you can—”

“Are you sure you’re not losing blood somewhere? Have you been out constantly, or have you been forcing yourself awake? Have you drunk any water or eaten any food?” Lauren asks, a manner so unrelenting, so like her.

“I just mean I want some silence to _think_ , Lauren. Some peace.”

“From what I heard earlier, it doesn’t sound like you’re getting what you want.”

Kieran turns, and though he does so languidly, his glare is so sharp she recoils at the jarring juxtaposition, and at the parallel of the old memory. “Because you literally invaded my _head_ , Lauren.” 

Lauren doesn’t question his choice of the word ‘ _head_ ’ to describe the cave. “I’m here because I’m worried for _you_ , Kieran. Besides, you having a nightmare is hardly my fault.”

Kieran’s head turns, jaw taut, mouth tasting like acid against metal. “I wasn’t having a nightmare,” he grits out. “And don’t concern yourself with my wellbeing. I’m alright, so drop it.”

“Kieran, you were _screaming_ ,” Lauren gapes, incredulous, “I thought someone was _dying_.”

Something flashes past his eyes. 

Something sharp stabs him between the ribs.

He doesn’t speak of it. “Nobody is, so you can leave.”

“No.”

Kieran throws his head back, straining his neck. His eyelids flutter close in his frustration, and Lauren’s composure flickers alike, but she stands rooted. 

“Lauren, please don’t be stubborn.” His voice is low, shaky. “I don’t think I can last another argument with you.”

In mild surprise, Lauren blinks. Her mouth opens and closes as she tries to say something. Finally, “Something must be direly wrong if you really think so, meaning I have every right to be worried. So let’s talk this out so we can go back to arguing like we always have.”

A slow stream of air exits Kieran’s nostrils. Then, his knees buckle, and he drops with his back against the carpeted ground, face to the ceiling, mouth hung open in his exhaustion. With considerable distance between them, Lauren lowers herself, sitting cross-legged as she scrutinizes him with concern.

They swim in the silence for moments that stretch to eternity, moments that feel like a split second. Moments that really are just mere minutes.

“I was thinking,” Kieran speaks up after a while.

Lauren’s jaw hinges open slightly, before she shuts it back patiently. Kieran’s eyes remained trained on the rock dome above him.

“Of you.”

Kieran doesn’t elaborate. She takes slow breaths, so as to not destroy the tranquility, the fragility of the air.

“If it makes you feel better,” Lauren says, her voice so scarcely delicate it settles all the way inside his chest, “I was thinking of you, too. Which is why I went looking for you. I think about you a lot at night.” 

She wonders how tired he must be to not show even the slightest reaction to her words, or if he’s really that unfazed. 

“It’s not always... in a good way, I’ll be honest,” Lauren continues, her fingers playing with the hem of her coat. “When I’m around you, sometimes I still get the phantom feeling of your hands, around…” She clears her throat. She doesn’t need to say it. “It hurts.”

Kieran wonders if the moisture lacing his palms is due to nervous sweat, or if it’s the memory of blood. Her blood, even if he’s never actually felt it.

“When I’m alone, I still see you, behind my shut eyelids. I hear you, echoing so loudly in my head. You, calling me a hypocrite… calling me a murderer, and it hurts even more.”

He wants to apologize. Again, and again, wash himself clean of her blood—but he knows it’s seeped under his skin, into his own bloodstream. He lets his eyes close, lets himself stare into the dark chasm, and he gets her, because he, too, sees her even with his eyes closed.

“On good nights,” he slowly croaks, “I think about your smirks, your _smiles_.” His words are tethered about as well as a cobweb, ready to give way any second. “On bad nights, I hear you calling me a monster over and over again. Somehow, it hurts more than… more than everything they did to me.”

Lauren’s eyes widen, and her heart tears at the sight of him trying to keep himself intact. “I’m sorry—”

“You shouldn’t be,” he cuts, cold as stalactite. “It only hurts because it’s true.”

She sees him, so broken and weak, lying on the ground so lifelessly as if he’s running out of time in his blood. It takes her a while to say it, but eventually she does: “It’s not, Kieran.”

How does one jest with such genuinity? It sends Kieran’s head reeling, and he does not know what to say. Silence returns, and if they listen closely, they might hear the rushing river outside, or the other’s heartbeat, over their own deafening thoughts.

“Neither are you,” he says after a while.

Lauren’s gaze, which has drifted off in her thought, snaps back to him. He still hasn’t moved.

“You’re not a hypocrite, and you’re most definitely not a murderer, Lauren. You don’t—” he coughs up, “you don’t know what it feels like to be a murderer unwilling, and god forbid you ever do.”

The scoff escapes her before she notices, her body falling into a slump. “I wonder a lot, you know. With the amount of people on our tails, wanting us dead—if it ever comes to a point where killing would be the only thing guaranteeing my survival—”

“No,” Kieran says adamantly, and suddenly his voice is much clearer, more confident. More _him_. “If anyone has to die so that we can proceed, then they die under my blade, like everyone else. They are my sin to bear, not yours. One more life won’t eat away my soul, but it will yours.”

Lauren physically flinches at the lie. She wants to call it out, wants so badly to rip all those layers he put up to bury himself in, but she stops herself—doing so will only break the surface of the ice she’s been carefully treading on.

She wants him to open up, to understand him, more than anything.

She starts with herself. 

“It’s not just about who does it, Kieran, it’s that it happened under my conscience. It’s why I live with this guilt.” She presses her palms against her kneecaps, her body shuddering as she takes a deep breath. “Because I knew, I _knew_ , and I did nothing of it. I let him—I let them die, Kieran. It makes me no different from being a murderer. I _am_ a hypocrite, and I shun you as the monster, as if I’m not doing something equally as horrendous, just because I don’t want to bear my own guilt.” Her voice cracks near the end, the cave never having felt so arctic in her own vulnerability. 

Kieran lets the words process in his head. He slowly begins to sit up, arms wrapped around his knees, and he stares ahead, somewhere to her side at the barren stone wall. 

“Regret.”

“Huh?”

His fingers tug on the sleeves of his shirt, too thin to bear the cold, but he never minds. “You asked the other day, what the purple hyacinths mean. They mean regret.” His voice is soothing, subdued. Sentimental, and it sits on her heartstrings like stacks of stone.

He pauses, eyes blinking slowly. “I know how you feel, and I know that death is death, a few lives or a hundred. But do take some consolation knowing you haven’t taken more lives than you could’ve. That you can learn from your mistake, that you have a choice in the future. Let it be your first, and your last.”

He doesn’t look at her the entire time. 

Even through the corners of his eyes, Lauren sees that he leaks his fears, his dreams into the words, and she grips the fabric of her coat a little tighter. She swallows the lump in her throat, and wets her lips in her anxiety.

“Did it… did it ever get easier?”

“Hm?” Kieran’s eyes briefly flit over to hers, and his insides recoil. Even in the dark cave, those aureate orbs of hers have its own vividness that can blind any onlooker unprepared, or like him, the defenseless. 

“The murders, did they…?”

He looks away, angling his head that Lauren can’t see the blue in his eyes. 

“Yesterday I took the life of a man,” he states. He’s trying for nonchalance, but she hears the shaky foundation. “A single father of a little girl, barely a preteen.”

Lauren can’t mask the sharp inhale, slicing the air between them in half. Kieran’s gaze falls to the ground ahead, and he lets out a small exhale of his own.

“I try to tell myself one more murder won’t count. One is nothing compared to a hundred when it’s not the first one—and I’m way past that point. My ledger’s completely drowned in red, one more drop of blood won’t make a difference.” He closes his eyes. “I’ve done this hundreds of times. It shouldn’t be too big of a deal.”

But one does make all the world’s difference. One second makes the difference between life and death, one drop makes the bottle overflow, one step to fall into the chasm ahead.

One death too many to destroy a soul utterly.

He presses on his knuckles, clenching and unclenching his jaw repeatedly. Lauren stares at him in dreadful anticipation, and she’s holding her breath, too scared to ruin the momentum. Kieran White comes and goes like the wind, flickers like sundust. There and gone before she ever realizes it.

“I thought of you.”

A painful chill paralyzes her face, and her jaw falls slack. She inhales heavily, but she can’t breathe. Air has never been more agonizing to her lungs.

Kieran is talking to her, but his mind is lost in his own feelings to mind her. “His daughter—she’s probably about your age when you lost everything. Allendale. When you turned into this person you are today: terribly drunk in tragedy, driven by pure rage. Unable to enjoy _anything_ without fearing what happens next, unable to go forward without being pulled back by the invisible thread of memory. You’ve been suffering alone for an entire _decade_ , still looking for answers, still unsatisfied, still traumatized. And I—”

His fingers ball into a fists, and his nails are claws to himself. He deserves only more.

“ _I_ cursed some young girl the same fate you did, even when I knew what would happen. And I can’t—I can’t stop imagining what will happen, imagining how much she’ll suffer in these following years, and I keep thinking of how much pain _I_ have brought her.”

There’s a fracture, and it begins with his voice.

And Lauren holds still, like even the slightest movement will cause the crack to explode, the bottle to shatter.

“I can’t sleep, because when I close my eyes—I see you.”

She wants to run, wants to hide. Hide herself away from him, spare him this pain.

“You are young,” he starts, and from then on his words tumble out like the river, undeterred. “You are young—and of course you never look quite the same in each iteration of the dream, because I don’t know what you look like when you were young. But it’s you, because your eyes are always so golden, so much like the sun that burns. And you are yelling, yelling at me for ruining your life. And—but those—but those words—” He brakes, and Lauren catches the first teardrop, glinting under the dim light of the cave. “Those words are the ones _I’ve_ said, the words I yelled at the… at the Phantom Scythe, at those monsters, all those years ago, when they ruined _my_ life.”

And she breaks, somewhere inside.

Kieran pries his eyes open, even if he desperately wants to close it, to close his eyes in oblivion to everything. “I couldn’t… come to work. I couldn’t bear to see you. All the world’s hyacinths will never express the fucking pain I feel, this… this regret that consumes me, the grief. Nothing will. I wasn’t sure if I could ever face you again. That’s why… that’s why I ran to the cave, where I was sure you wouldn’t ever find me.”

“Kieran,” Lauren whispers. “Kieran, I found you. I’m here.”

He forces himself to look at her, even when the tears burn against his cheeks. “ _Why_ , Lauren?” He is desperate, his voice ruptured. “Why did you come here? You know what I did to you here.” Shaking, he lifts up his fist and lodges it between his teeth, biting down with so much force to keep himself from screaming, from _reacting_. She doesn’t deserve that, not again.

But Lauren lifts herself off the ground, heading over to him. “Kieran—” she kneels in front of his helpless face, “you’re… so much more than the person who hurt me that night.” Her hands hover over his fist, trembling in the slightest, but in their proximity she is sure he notices. Before he gets to point it out, she cradles his fist with both her palms, and slowly, gently, pulls it away from his mouth. 

He stares at her agape, and his lips are quivering so hard, it shakes even her composure. She feels the tears welling behind her eyes, but she doesn’t mind. “You’ve… you’ve been trying to prove that you’re not… not that you. And I see it, Kieran, I do. I see you. And—and, in a time where it’s so hard to trust anybody, in a time so terribly lonely… I want to be with you. We can’t— _fuck_ ,” she exhales and sniffles, “we can’t just let one terrible moment define our entire relationship. It’s a problem we’ll have to overcome _together_ , the way we’ve been doing everything.”

Kieran shakes his head, like everything’s another hallucination his mind decides to conjure for him tonight. “I tried, Lauren. I _try_.” His fist under her palms clenches. “But when I think of you—”

He lets out the first sob, the excruciating sound dragged through his throat like body against gravel, lines of flesh exposed. It hurts to breathe, and yet it still hurts more to look at her. His body shakes violently in his silent sobs, endless streams of tears dripping down his chin.

And Lauren is still looking at him, mere inches away from him, and she, too, is crying. But she doesn’t leave. She stays, holding his hand in two of hers as carefully as you would a child, her fingers rubbing circles on the teeth-sunken marks. “I’m sorry,” she breathes out, before shaking her head resolutely. She presses against his fist, not with force, but with warmth. “No, actually, no. No, I’m not.”

Kieran’s vision of her is obscured, but he keeps his eyes on her nonetheless, confused, lost. 

“No, I’m not sorry that you’re feeling this way when you see me,” Lauren clarifies as she sniffles, wiping her tears away from her cheek. “Because this only tells me that you still do feel the regret. That there’s still an ounce of sentiment in you, that I can trust you, that I can _relate_ to you.” 

She presses the back of her hand against her eyes, blinking repeatedly to clear her vision. Kieran watches her eyebrows fall, melting into the concentrated gaze she so often equips herself with, the fire behind her eyes, the determination in her stance. She looks at him this way—Lauren, who goes to extreme lengths to get what she wants, dead set on _him_ —and suddenly, he doesn’t feel so hollow anymore.

Suddenly, there’s a small spark of hope, or something of kin. 

“And if this guilt is what you need to keep living, to keep fighting, then I’ll stay with you,” Lauren says undaunted. “I’ll stay with you, so you keep _feeling_ , so you’ll be as driven as I am to take the Phantom Scythe down.”

Her hand squeezes his fist a little tighter, and she lets her other hand graze the edge of his face. Ironic is that his jaw is much sharper than the soft skin of her fingers, yet the tenderness is the one that hurts him more.

“Kieran, you’re all I’ve got,” Lauren whispers, the sound louder than any explosion he can dream of. “Not just as someone who’s got as much nerve as I do to take them down. You understand this pain of mine, and I, yours. You’re not—you’re not alone.”

Kieran’s eyelids flutter shut gently, his lashes damp from the tears that flow incessantly out of the corner of his eyes. His tears pool on her fingers, but she doesn’t wipe them away, letting them flow down to her palm.

“You can sob, Kieran. You can cry.”

Lauren looks at him, not much higher from where he sits. But he is back to being thirteen, wounded and tattered, thrown into the Bermuda without a warning, without anything to hold on, to keep him afloat, to breathe. And he looks up at Lauren, and she is holding him, his tiny fist in her palm, with the gold of a thousand suns in her eyes, a gravitating star.

So he cries.

He tips the bottle himself, letting the tears stream out of him in steady rivers, pouring wails out of his mouth. They resound in the cave like a familiar lullaby that accompanies mourners at night, those who lie awake under all the moon’s faces, company of the rise and fall of the sea. The chains that bind him fall slack in her presence, and tension leaves his body.

His fists relax under her touch, and Lauren slots her palm against his, curling her fingers over his. It fits, lock and key, black and white, sun and moon.

Kieran anchors himself to her hand—to her, his constant, the ever-changing paradox; she who he fears, she who fears him, she who yells at him, she who whispers, she who pushes him, she who holds him.

Changing, and he doesn’t ever want to let go.

The sobs send his body racking, his heart relieved and constricted simultaneously. He takes her hand and presses the back of it against his chest, close, hard, as he fights to breathe.

And Lauren—she feels his reverberant heartbeat, travelling from his chest to her hand, through her bones and into her ribs, pulsing with the energy of an earthquake that shakes the core of everything she thinks she knows, everything she’s sure of.

She does not know anything. Once, in this very cave, she thought she did, that she had him figured out. But she doesn’t. Knows nothing of him, his past, his future, his present. Knows not what will happen to them, what road they will take, how far their fate extends, where her lifeline ends. Knows not even herself, the things she’ll do—for what, for _who_.

She knows he’ll be with her when it happens.

They’ll be together—of that, she is sure.

**Author's Note:**

> Might've been a little OOC—but Ep. 84 reveals two things to me: 1. Lauren is trying to put the effort for their relationship, not just Kieran, and 2. Kieran has his own demons to face. So that's what I decided to deal with here :")
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! Kudos and comments will be much appreciated, and Rabbit, I hope you enjoyed this math-free fic 😌✨❤️


End file.
